November 09, 2016

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

...they [those who built cities and nuclear plants in vulnerable locations] were trained to break problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces ("externalities") that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable. [p.56]

I is certainly no coincidence that these were the very places where, as Guy Debord observed, the reigning economic system not only founded on isolation, it was also "designed to produce isolation." [p.79]

In short, as the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has long argued, modernity was not a "virus" that spread from the West to the rest of the world. It was rather a "global and conjunctural phenomenon," with many iterations arising almost simultaneously in different parts of the world. [p.95]

Here again is an instance of what I cited earlier as the one feature of Western modernity that is truly distinctive: its enormous intellectual commitment to the promotion of its supposed singularity. [p.103]

The Opium War of 1839-42 was the first important conflict to be fought in the name of free trade and unfettered markets; yet, ironically, the most obvious lesson of this period is that capitalist trade and industry cannot thrive without access to military and political power. [p.109]

And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis; for if there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. [p.128]

As far back as the 1960s Guy Debord argued in his seminal book The Society of the Spectacle: "The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense collection of spectacles. [Think about the recent presidential election.] [p.131]

But they [future generations] may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable -- for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats. [p.135]

In short, even if capitalism were to be magically transformed tomorrow, the imperatives of political and military dominance would remain a significant obstacle to progress on mitigatory action. [for more on this see Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed] [p.146]

In the text of the Paris Agreement, by contrast [with the Pope's Encyclical], there is not the slightest acknowledgement that something has gone wrong with our dominant paradigms; it contains no clause or article that could be interpreted as a critique of the practices that are known to have created the situation that the Agreement seeks to address. The current paradigm of perpetual growth is enshrined at the core of the text. [p.164]